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V10 Windows desktop performance


paul1949

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I upgraded to v10 of windows desktop based on a marketing e-mail claiming 100% performance improvement. Well I have seen no improvement. On v9.5 15.9Gb took 13:59 and on v10 15.3Gb took 13:21 (see attachment for log detail). This was on the same desktop using the same source files and backup disk set (i.e. no difference in hardware at all, just upgraded to v10.0.0.213). What are other forum members experiences of v10 so far?

Retrospect v10 performance.txt

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I have experienced no noticeable improvement either. I suspect the improvements are due to better co-ordination of Instant Scan (which I do not use/trust) in combination with multiple clients.

 

Hopefully there will be a major improvement in copying snapshots which suddenly took 3 times longer with v9.5 than they did with previous versions. So they slow it down prior to releasing the new version, then speed it back up again with the new version and claim speed enhancements. Or am I just being cynical :-P

 

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Hi all, thanks for your replies. I upgraded rather than re-installed retrospect v10 software on both my retrospect backup server and network clients. I did raise a support ticket and the official response was:

 

"Looking at how much data you are backing up we would not expect much if at all of a performance increase for your environment. The speed and amount of time it is taking to do the snapshots looks good."

 

In my case I provided two data backup sets of 15.3 and 15.9 Gb. These were full backups, not incremental and the second one using a network based client. It's interesting that the analyst says they would not expect to see much of an improvement on such a low backup volume - even when the marking hype says their tests were on 24gb data sets! I also asked for the technical detail of the configuration used by retrospect to determine the 50% time improvement claimed in their literature, but they did not provide any answers in the support ticket.

 

Overall, I guess this improvement must be on incremental backups somehow, but who knows if Retrospect won't actually say how they calculated the 50% time savings in the first place.

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Sorry for the confusion. As people have seen, the performance increases do depend on your environment, not on the amount of data transferred or on Instant Scan. The new release is significantly faster in backing up and restoring data on remote clients. It also has improved logic for what cached files to exclude on all platforms. Both improvements are more noticeable on incremental backups. For example, backing up a Windows client could be twice as fast for an incremental backup. As our support team said, the performance change for a local Windows backup could be negligible, depending on the state of cached files.

 

There are a number of other great improvements to the product in this release–grooming, email, dashboard, SQL 2014–but again, their relevance depends on your environment.

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I have just recently installed V10 and for one of my clients - it is indeed taking about 1/2 the time that it used to for roughly the same amount of data. The other client that I have backed up thus far with V10 shows also a similar amount. Both of these are remote clients - I run the the backups from a separate Windows box and use remote clients for all of the computers that I need to back up. So I am never doing any local backup.

 

One new thing that I like a lot is the additional detail being reported in the log during the snapshot phase. Nice to be able to see a finer grained reporting on progress in that step.

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  • 1 month later...

Certainly hardware is a limiting factor in many environments. I back up to an SATA2 external drive. I'm sure it would be faster with an SATA3 drive.

 

I have definitely seen increased speed in creating a snapshot for drive C, which has always taken as long or longer than copying files. That's no longer the case.

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  • 1 month later...

I just upgraded to V10 and have the following observations: My "server" has 4x2.83GhZ CPUs and 8GB of RAM. Looking at the Windows 7 Performance Monitor its obvious that Retrospect is single-threaded and is only using one CPU.  It seems to me that you should be breaking up the CPU oriented functions such as lookup, compression, and encryption onto multiple CPUs.  Why don't you do this????

Also, while backing up a client  over a Wi-Fi 100mb link I can only get 25mbits/sec.  What's up with that!?.  The CPUs and disk on both machines are just twiddling their fingers waiting on the network.

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I just upgraded to V10 and have the following observations: My "server" has 4x2.83GhZ CPUs and 8GB of RAM. Looking at the Windows 7 Performance Monitor its obvious that Retrospect is single-threaded and is only using one CPU.  It seems to me that you should be breaking up the CPU oriented functions such as lookup, compression, and encryption onto multiple CPUs.  Why don't you do this????

 

 

My experience is one execution unit = one CPU.

How many executions do you run simultaneously?

 

 

Also, while backing up a client  over a Wi-Fi 100mb link I can only get 25mbits/sec.  What's up with that!?.  The CPUs and disk on both machines are just twiddling their fingers waiting on the network.

 

Wifi is bad news concerning backup. On a wired network, there is full duplex and on a fully switched network (which is the norm nowadays) you have the full bandwidth by yourself.

 

On a Wifi network, you don't have full duplex. So the data goes from the client to the router and then from the router to the retro server. This bandwidth is shared with all other activities happening on WiFi. Do you have other Wifi networks nearby? They can disturb your signal. If it far from the router to you client and/or server? Walls/floors in between?

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